Jogira Sara Ra Ra (2023) [Hall-Rip]

The casting of two very unsuitable actors is the biggest shortcoming of Kushan Nandy’s Jogira Sara Ra Ra. Neha Sharma, the female lead, does not have the requisite cuteness to play the manic pixie dream girl, the slightly whacky but always endearing mainstay of romantic comedies. And the two, even going by the opposites attract rule, have zero chemistry.

Jogi Pratap (Siddiqui) is a Lucknow wedding organiser, with a can-do jugaadu spirit that he always boasts of. But even he comes up short when he runs into tipsy gate-crasher, Dimple Chaubey (Sharma). Later, when he is hired to organise her wedding, she wants him to use his jugaad to break it up. She does not want to marry the overweight milquetoast Lallu (Mahaakshay Chakraborty) her parents have picked for her, mainly because no dowry has been demanded. If there is a tiny social comment about the sorry state of women in India, who are burdened Jogira Sara Ra Ra with pernicious social customs, it is negated by Jogi’s reason for avoiding marriage — he has four sisters, a mother and an aunt at home, which, he says, is one too many ‘ladies’. The women are a screechy demanding lot, and not one of them does anything useful with her time. It’s not that Dimple has any ambitions either, she is okay with marriage and dowry, but just not with unsexy Lallu. After all his schemes fail, Jogi stages a kidnapping, and hides Dimple in his own house, where the ‘ladies’ take to her immediately. The local cops, Yadav and Yadav (Vishwanath Chatterjee, Ghanshyam Garg) are hand-in-glove with Chacha (Sanjay Mishra), the head of the Chaudhary gang, who kidnap for ransom and send over the cops for their share. They refuse to believe Dimple was not kidnapped by Chacha or that no ransom was paid, and demand their cut.